Sunday, October 30, 2016

I didn’t care for 2009’s reboot of the “Star Trek” franchise or its sequel, which placed me firmly in the minority of public opinion. I think the latest, “Star Trek Beyond,” is the best of the bunch – which is to say, merely mediocre.

The basic premise of this iteration is that the cast of the Enterprise are stranded on a strange planet and must contend with hostile forces. I don’t know about you, but I always thought the TV episodes where Kirk & Co. spent the bulk of their time planetside were usually the worst. I mean, it’s called “Star Trek,” not “Land Trek.”

Get back onto the bridge and do some space-y stuff, I say.

Anyway, while exploring reports of a lost Federation ship in a remote corner of the galaxy, the Enterprise is attacked by a swarm of enemies and destroyed, with Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto) and the rest escaping and split up on the surface of the mysterious planet. Many are captured by Krall (Idris Elba), a strange alien who’s brewing up a nasty bioweapon.

(I remember when they self-destructed the Enterprise in “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” and it was a really big deal. Now they go through Enterprises like phaser batteries.)

With J.J. Abrams having decamped to take over the other big science fiction franchise, Star Wars, director Justin Lin takes over. The script was written by Doug Jung and Simon Pegg, who also plays engineer Montgomery Scott. Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, John Cho and Anton Yelchin reprise their roles as Dr. McCoy, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov, respectively.

It’s much more of a self-contained action/adventure than a real progression of the Star Trek mythology. Among other things, Kirk gets to ride an old Earth motorcycle, dazzling his enemies with his rad drifting and jumps. I half expected him to whip out an old Fonzie jacket, too.

It often feels like the movie would do anything to not be a Star Trek movie. Based on the previous two flicks, I think they made the right choice.

Bonus features are excellent, though you’ll have to shell out for the Blu-ray version – the DVD contains exactly none.

These include deleted scenes, gag reel, tributes to deceased stars Leonard Nimoy and Anton Yelchin, a perspective on the 50-year history of Trek with Abrams and the cast, plus seven making-of featurettes touching on every aspect of production, from story creation to special effects.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

The Robert Langdon movies have been an undeniable buttress for the careers of author Dan Brown, director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks.

I don’t know anyone who considers “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels & Demons” great movies, but they were energetic and got people to go to the theater to check out the hubbub. And maybe along the way a few became interested in a tidbit of history or a religious artifact contained in the movie and decided to explore their world further. Or maybe they saw a Coming Soon poster for another, better film and came back to see that.

In short, the Langdon flicks are the sort of popular movies that come along, make a ton of money and are then promptly forgotten. For instance, I couldn’t remember how long it had been since the last one: seven years. Their existence is unnecessary but not objectionable.

They’re probably my least favorite Tom Hanks movies, because instead of building a character he’s made to chase a chimera around for two hours while looking pained. It’s like asking LeBron to be the ball boy.

If Indiana Jones was an adventurer who reluctantly deigned to drop in at the university from time to time, then Robert Langdon is a dweeby academic with a penchant for puzzles who keeps getting sucked into dangerous escapades. These always involve clues hidden in ancient works of art and schemes to destroy/upend the world as we know it.

(Are there any other kind of schemes in the movies?)

The newest, “Inferno,” has decidedly less of a religious bent than its predecessors, which caused them to be controversial. “Da Vinci” posited that the Catholic Church covered up that Jesus actually married and had a family, producing modern descendants. (Sorry, after 10 years spoiler warnings become moot.) Maybe Dan Brown grew tired of all the protests, but there’s no Christian conspiracy theories in this one.

This threat comes from Bertrand Zobrist, a billionaire bioengineer played by Ben Foster who thinks overpopulation spells mankind’s doom within the next couple of generations. So he hatches a plot to kill half the world with a nasty virus called Inferno. Langdon spends the movie trying to foil it, traveling to Florence, Venice and Istanbul.

But he’s at a disadvantage. As the story opens, Langdon wakes up in a hospital, groggy and in pain. He’s been shot in the head (grazed) and can’t remember anything that’s happened to him recently. There are horrible visions of rivers of blood, hellfire and damnation, bodies twisted and riddled with pestilence. A helpful ER doctor, Sienna (Felicity Jones), tries to fill in the blanks.

“You won’t be able to trust your own thoughts for a while,” she warns.

But then a slavering assassin dressed as a policewoman shows up firing her pistol willy-nilly, and Langdon and the doc are on the run. The assassin is played by Ana Ularu, who has a great aggressive face, like the pointed muzzle of wolf.

They follow a trail of clues to the virus left by Zobrist because… well, otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie, would there? This includes an alteration of a famous painting contained in a bone flashlight, stealing Dante’s death mask, a beautiful old cistern that’s been turned into a concert hall, and other cool artsy crossovers.

Joining the hunt are Sidse Babette Knudsen and Omar Sy as agents of the World Health Organization, here depicted as indistinguishable from James Bond types in suits and deadly skills. And Irrfan Khan plays the head of a mysterious private agency that pulls lots of global strings from their HQ aboard a seaborne ship.

It’s obvious that Langdon is being played for a sap. The burning question is, by whom?

“Inferno” is about on par with the other Langdon flicks, maybe a tad better. You’ll never be bored, but if quizzed on the story the next day I bet most people would score a grade of D or lower.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

I see around 200 movies a year, plenty of good ones, a healthy portion of bad ones, a whole bunch of mediocre ones. What I rarely see these days are movies that are just plain boring.

Say what you will about our current system for making and delivering films to the public -- the overemphasis on spectacle, too few indies and foreign movies making it out to the heartland, etc. But there’s almost always something interesting going on in films that get a significant theatrical release, even in the weakest cinematic fare.

I mean, “Jupiter Ascending” was a screaming pile of laughable dog doo-doo. But it wasn’t like I would’ve rather spent the time folding laundry.

I can’t honestly say the same about “Certain Women” -- at least, most of it. It’s three disparate stories of women living in Montana, based on the short stories of Maile Meloy. Adapted and directed by Kelly Reichardt, it has three chapters that barely intersect with each other -- literally, one character from a section may pass by another, but that’s it.

Like a lot of episodic movies, some parts rise and other parts fall. In this case, the final act is breathtaking in the quiet power of its fragile emotions. The first two are so listless I wondered why anyone thought these stories deserved to be on celluloid.

Let’s be generous and talk about the last one first.

It stars Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone as two young women who are drawn to each other. Stewart is Beth, a newly minted lawyer who signed up for a job teaching education law at night school, not realizing it was a four-hour drive away. Gladstone is Jamie, a f’real cowgirl who takes care of horses at a local ranch.

Jamie wanders into the class -- she’s not a student; she just saw people going in and was looking for something to do. She was mesmerized by the awkward, honest grace of Beth, and keeps coming back to the class. They hook up for meals at the local diner after class.

Jamie doesn’t really talk much, but Gladstone’s wide, strong face does all the communicating we need. She’s clearly smitten, and uses her limited verbal and emotional vocabulary to let Beth know how she feels.

This section, which feels both workaday and dreamy, reminded me in a lot of ways of “Brokeback Mountain” -- not just the same-sex attraction, but how everyday folks have trouble expressing their inner selves.

There’s some of that in the other two acts as well, but it’s far less compelling. Certainly there is not anywhere the emotive resonance of the final section.

Laura Dern plays another lawyer. She’s got a PITA client ( Jared Harris), who suffered a devastating on-the-job injury but foolishly signed away any liability for a small settlement. She’s spent eight months explaining to him that their hands are tied, but it’s not until she takes him to consult with an older male attorney that he finally accepts it. On the ride back to town he jokes with her about taking a machine gun to his old job, and we’re not sure where the joke ends and the pain begins.

In the middle piece, Michelle Williams and James Le Gros play a married couple building a house in the woods. They’re currently living in a souped-up tent, and there’s some friction over their parenting styles toward their teen daughter (Sara Rodier). They visit an older man (René Auberjonois) who obviously has dementia and sorta/kinda sweet-talk him out of some sandstone bricks from the old schoolhouse that are lying around his property, which they want to use for their project.

I wish I could say there’s more going on in these parts beyond what I just described, but there isn’t.

“Certain Women” is a terrific short film that is stitched unnecessarily to two far lesser short films. If you can survive the dullness of the first two acts, the third is worth hanging around for.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Director Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood made four films together in the space of three years from 1968-71, including "Dirty Harry," but hadn't worked together in awhile by 1979 -- and never would again.

Partly that was due to Eastwood taking over the helm of most of the films he appeared in, after an apprenticeship that began with 1971's "Play Misty for Me." But it also was because the two wrangled over rights to the spec script by Richard Tuggle, who spent six months researching the infamous prison after reading the book by J. Campbell Bruce. Siegel ended up buying the rights to the screenplay out from under Eastwood's nose. They went ahead with "Alcatraz" for old time's sake, but never made another picture together.

The film is a well-done iteration in the prison drama genre, though it doesn't really break much new ground. Eastwood delivers his typical inscrutable tough guy performance of that era; you can pretty much swap out his acting style between movies without missing a beat.

But it worked, so why change? As the old saying goes, actors play roles but stars play themselves.

What I found most interesting about it is how much later films, particularly "The Shawshank Redemption," resemble it. Keep in mind the latter movie only came out 15 years after "Alcatraz" did, and Stephen King's novella, upon which "Shawshank" was based, was published in 1982. I'm not accusing anyone of lifting from anyone else, but let's just say there seemed to be a lot of "inspiration" going on between the three works.

The similarity in character types is pretty amazing. The main character, Frank Morris, is a fairly non-communicative fellow, smarter than the rest, whose arrival shakes up the status quo in the inmate populate. He befriends an older black man, English (Paul Benjamin), a long-timer whose wisdom and caution have propelled him to the top of the food chain. He's threatened with homosexual rape by a vicious thug, Wolf (Bruce M. Fischer), who wants to turn Frank into his "punk," aka prison wife.

Sounds familiar, huh? Well, the parallels go even further.

There's an old man, Doc (Roberts Blossom), who leaves the story about halfway through under tragic circumstances that underline the plight of the main character. In this case, Doc is an artist who lives to paint portraits. He does one of himself with a flower pinned to his shirt, representing "the part they can't take away." But the spiteful warden (Patrick McGoohan), who thinks the purpose of Alcatraz is punishment rather than rehabilitation, takes away Doc's paints, crippling his spirit.

A young uppity inmate, Charley Butts (Larry Hankin), enters the story around the same time Doc leaves, whose gentle nature and enthusiasm for life lifts the other prisoners' mood. He gets roped into Frank's plot to escape, along with two generic tough guy brothers, John and Clarence Anglin (Fred Ward, Jack Thibeau), who are veteran jailbreakers.

Throw in a few other archetypal prison types -- like Litmus (Frank Ronzio), who puts up a hard front but keeps a pet mouse in his pocket -- and you could almost transpose the entire cast of "Alcatraz" into "Shawshank" without much of a bump. (Danny Glover has a blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo that marks his feature film debut.)

It should be noted that Frank and the Anglins were real people, while pretty much everyone else is made up or a variation on reality. There was indeed a fourth inmate in on the escape attempt who was left behind, but his name wasn't Charley Butts. The real guy cooperated with investigators and never received any punishment for his collaboration.

Pretty much the entire second half of the film is a tense crime procedural as Frank and his co-conspirators work out the method of their escape. Using a nail clipper -- ostensibly stolen from the very desk of the warden himself -- welded to a spoon handle, Frank chips out the rotting cement around the grate underneath the sink in his cell. The three men squeeze through into a utility corridor, climb up and out the roof by bending some bars with a pipe and use life preservers and a crude raft fashioned from raincoats to swim away.

To conceal their work, they dump the gravel from their excavations into the prison yard through their pant legs, as we've seen in "The Great Escape" and countless other prison break films. They fashioned paper mache dummy heads, complete with pasted hair from the prison barber, to make it look like they were asleep in their bunks. And similarly fashioned facade grates covered the holes in their cells.

"Escape from Alcatraz" was filmed in the actual prison itself, which was shut down shortly after the Morris escape in 1962, but remains a tourist destination to this day. All the automatic cell doors and everything else still worked, though the studio had to spend half a million dollars to run massive power lines under San Francisco Bay, since the prison's electrical plant no longer functioned.

Obviously, this lends the film a lot of innate authenticity, as we get to see how inmates lived and moved around in cells that were literally the size of a broom closet -- 5 feet by 9 feet. Watching how the men arranged their meager belongings on shelves, or using their commodes as a desktop, I kept musing to myself that prison inmates were the original pioneers of the "tiny home" fad.

There's never really a huge sense of peril in the movie since it's, y'know, Clint effing Eastwood. Unlike Andy Dufresne, you just know he's not going to take it up the keister from time to time. Although it is notable that Frank is marched into the prison in the buff, which as far as I know represents Eastwood's only nude scene in his long career.

Historically, it is highly debated what happened to Morris and his two fellows. Alcatraz had long been fabled as the prison from which no one escaped alive, and there's a certain inspiration for officials to want to keep that streak alive. No bodies were ever found, so there's no way to be certain either way.

"Escape from Alcatraz" looks at first glance like a by-the-numbers prison flick that borrowed heavily from other movies -- until you realize other movies are borrowing from it.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Barely cracking the 80-minute mark, “Lights Out” is a terse and tense horror film that relies on familiar tropes -- half-imagined spirits stalking people, especially while they’re trying to sleep -- but does so with verve and some very effective scares.

Watching it, I thought about the fact that we don’t learn too much about the backstories of the characters, especially protagonist Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), a wayward daughter who tries to protect her younger brother, Martin (Gabriel Bateman), from her psychologically unbalanced mother, Sophie (Maria Bello).

We know she’s somewhat defensive and cut off from others, seeing as how she keeps her boyfriend, Bret (Alexander DiPersia), at arm’s length -- even going so far as to deny his boyfriend status after eight months together. She favors Goth clothing and makeup, and decorates her crummy apartment with disturbing drawings and posters.

But really, in a movie like this, do we really need to know her whole life story? Rebecca’s job here is to be relatable, someone who starts out scared and grows stronger, who we can root for when the boogums come calling.

Here that spirit is a skeletal female figure who only appears in darkness. The movie’s signature scare tactic is having the lights go on and off, either by a switch or some other device, with the creature flashing closer each time the lights go off. It’s simple, but quite effective.

Director David F. Sandberg, who adapted this feature from his own short film, and screenwriter Eric Heisserer focus on the scares rather than the psychology. The result is a stripped-down, spare horror tale that is all muscle and little fat.

Bonus features are pretty scant, limited to just a few deleted scenes. It’s hard to believe there was much material to cut out, considering how lean the movie already is. Apparently, sometimes less really is more.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

One thing I appreciated about “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” is that action scenes existed within the realm of the possible. Sure, Tom Cruise’s ex-Army officer can dish out the chop-socky with the best of the Bournes and Bonds.

But when he gets hit, it staggers him. Blows leave marks; his face swells up and stays puffy.

I’m not sure how many moviegoers have ever been punched in the face. I have, once, in second grade. It was a bigger kid, but even fourth graders don’t pack all that much in a swing. Still, I went down, hard. That’s what actual people do when punched straight-on.

It helps make Reacher seem more relatable. Especially when he does things that border on super-human, like luring four bad guys into a factory so he can take them out, unarmed -- but not before the prerequisite taunting and quipping.

“Jack Reacher” is a straightforward bubblegum action flick. It does not pretend to be more than it is. If it’s important for humans to know thyself, then that goes doubles for movies. Most of the bad ones are trying to be something they’re not, or haven’t figured out what they are.

Director Edward Zwick, who co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Wenk and Marshall Herskovitz (based on the book by Lee Child), takes over for Christopher McQuarrie. His action scenes may not have the same zip – it’s not hard to spot Cruise’s stunt double -- but the narrative has a little more cohesion.

Reacher retired from the military a few years ago to wander the land with nothing more than the clothes on his back and his military pension to pay for some scuzzy motels. He lends a hand wherever he can, especially when do-gooders are being rousted by no-good-doers.

His contact back in D.C. is Maj. Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), who took over his old job heading up the military investigations unit. After years of phone flirting, they resolve to have a date in-person. But when Reacher shows up, he learns she’s been arrested for espionage. Soon enough, he’s implicated too.

The rest of the movie is a series of chases, with our pair trying to stay ahead of some ex-military contractors named ParaSource, while simultaneously trying to pin the crimes on them. A trail of bodies soon grows.

Complicating things is 15-year-old Samantha (fresh-faced Danika Yarosh), who may or may not be Reacher’s daughter. It doesn’t really matter if it’s true, since if she’s being used as leverage against Reacher, he figures he has to protect her anyway. Not exactly the paternal type, he’s kind of baffled by the vagaries of teendom.

Rounding out the cast are Robert Knepper as a sinister general, Aldis Hodge as the straight man following orders to a fault, and Patrick Heusinger as Reacher’s dark twin -- a similarly skilled operative but without the moral code.

The movie’s a showcase for Cruise, as are pretty much all of his movies these days. He’s 54 now and finally starting to show it. His face has gotten some new crevices and hollows, and he wears it well. He looks like a guy who’s gotten beat up a lot, and dished out even more. His body is toned as always, but no matter how many crunches and cardio you do, at a certain point things start to droop and spread out.

It all works. Twenty years ago we wouldn’t have bought Tom Cruise as a burnt-out loner. But now Jack Reacher fits him like a glove.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

At first glance “A Man Called Ove” seems like a Swedish version of the bitter old man roles we’ve seen from the likes of Paul Newman (“Nobody’s Fool”) and Jack Nicholson (“About Schmidt”).

But really, it’s a love story. Not about falling in love, but reclaiming it.

Rolf Lassgård plays Ove, who seemingly lives solely to be a pain-in-the-tuckus, constantly insulting others and holding everyone to his own set of high standards. He’s the sort of petty authority figure who has bestowed himself with all sorts of powers, and acts as if this is something everyone has agreed upon.

Wearing the same nondescript cap and coat every day, he trudges around his orderly little village, tugging on locks to make sure they’re secure and hollering at the pet owners to keep their furry friends from piddling where they oughtn’t. Once upon a time he was chairman of the residents’ association, but his position was stripped years ago in a “coup” -- i.e., a democratic election -- and Ove clings to his bitterness like a talisman.

He has worked at the train depot for 43 years, following in his late father’s footsteps. When two young managers offer to transition him to a training program for older workers to acquire new skills, Ove cuts to the chase: Why don’t I just get up right now and leave, and make it simpler for all of us?

At age 59, Ove does not suffer fools -- a description he believes applies to virtually everyone but him.

Directed and written by Hannes Holm from the novel by Fredrik Backman, “A Man Called Ove” starts out in a very dark place and gradually moves toward the light. We sense the change and embrace it, so Ove’s evolution feels natural rather than compulsory.

After losing his job, Ove resolves to kill himself. His beloved wife, Sonja (a vibrant Ida Engvoll), passed away six months ago and with her his only connection to the happier things in life. Like many men his age and class, Ove is a hands-on sort who can fix almost anything and defines himself by his usefulness; he leaned on Sonja to be his connection to the community.

He tries suicide hanging, but is interrupted by a new family moving in across the street. The husband (Tobias Almborg) is an “idiot” (Ove’s favorite designation) who can’t even back up a car. But his wife, Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), is a headstrong woman from Iran who drops off saffron rice and enlist the older man’s in everything from babysitting her two daughters to giving driving lessons. She offers friendship, and eventually Ove responds with… irked tolerance.

(For him, that’s a breakthrough.)

Subsequent suicide attempts -- asphyxiation, shotgun, etc. -- are similarly disturbed by the intrusion of others, until it becomes a running joke. Visiting his wife’s grave daily, he promises to be with her soon… after he fixes a bicycle for a youngster, and Parvaneh’s baby is born, and so on.

Flashback sequences show us Ove as a boy (Viktor Baagøe) and later as a teenager and young man (Filip Berg). He obtained much of his blue-collar view of the world from his father (Stefan Gödicke), as well as his devotion to Saab automobiles. Later, he strikes up a friendship with a like-minded villager, but they angrily part ways over the other man’s affinity for Volvos and later -- ye gods! -- a BMW.

As the story unfolds, we discover Ove and how he became the man he is, and he rediscovers his own past and finds things there that are missing now. Here is a man who is constantly telling the story of himself, how the world is unfair and the corporate “whiteshirts” always get their way, whether it’s tearing down the family home or institutionalizing a neighbor. Ove learns he doesn’t like the yarn he’s been spinning.

“A Man Called Ove” is a splendidly acted and oddly sweet film. It’s about a miserable old wretch who wants to kill himself, and is continually foiled by other people who need him around. In seeking death, he keeps finding new reasons to live.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

I guess I’m just Mr. Contrarian. I despised 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland,” starring Johnny Depp as a decidedly off-kilter Mad Hatter. But the sequel is a charming romp that uses Lewis Carroll’s second novel as a mere jumping-off point for its own series of crazy, colorful adventures.

Of course, the first movie was a huge hit and the second died a quick death at the box office. Apparently, the majority of moviegoers like what I hate and hate what I like.

(Considering that for my epitaph.)

Perhaps give “Alice Through the Looking Glass” a chance on video, and maybe we’ll find we’re not so far apart after all.

This story (screenplay by Linda Woolverton) digs deeper into the Hatter’s past, using a kooky time-traveling device to see how he became so delightfully dinghy. Three years after the events in the last movie, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returns to Underland to find Hatter has taken deathly ill.

In a delirium -- I know, hard to tell the difference with this one -- Hatter insists that his family, long thought killed by the Jaberwocky, is somehow alive and waiting for him. They track down Time himself (Sacha Baron Cohen) and steal his Chronosphere to jump back to years past.

Of course, the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), she of the outsized head and aggressiveness, returns to muck up their quest. Anne Hathaway also shows up as the White Queen, and we find out a little more about the sisters’ long-ago divergence.

James Bobin, taking over the directing chair from Tim Burton, keeps the story more or less on an even keel. It turns out that when you have characters and creatures straight out of pure imagination, it helps to arrange them in a methodical way, rather than splaying them out randomly as the previous film did.

But don’t just take my word for it.

Bonus features are quite good, though you’ll have to buy the Blu-ray version to get the vast majority of them. The DVD comes only with one featurette about the making of the costumes.

The Blu-ray includes several more making-of mini-documenatires, the music video for “Just Like Fire” with P!nk, side-by-side comparisons of raw footage and final scenes, profiles of minor characters, deleted scenes and a feature-length commentary track with Bobin.

Thursday, October 13, 2016

There’s a lot of things to like about “The Accountant,” but tonally the film is a sloppy, gloppy mess.

It starts out as a serious character examination of a high-functioning autistic man played by Ben Affleck who works as an accountant for some very bad people -- terrorists, drug cartels, repressive regimes, etc. Then he quickly morphs into a Jason Bourne-like character who can bullseye people a mile away and chop-socky them to death up close.

It begins on a very somber note, and by the end has more or less turned into a full-out action/comedy. Somewhere in here is a romance that gets dropped down a well, and a redemptive tale of a shiftless bureaucrat who found his calling late in life.

Director Gavin O’Connor (“Warrior”) and script man Bill Dubuque gather an interesting cast of characters and story elements, but can’t assemble them into a coherent piece. Still, if you look at it purely as popcorn entertainment, there’s a lot of assets in the ledger.

The story opens with Christian Wolff as a kid (played by Seth Lee), prone to fits and cut off from the rest of the world. But he’s got brilliance beneath the behavior, as evidenced by his ability to put together a huge puzzle in minutes -- with the picture facing upside down -- while waiting to talk to a therapist. His father (Robert C. Treveiler) is a stern Army man, and gives him a brutal upbringing of tough love and combat training so he can survive.

Now in his late 30s or so, Christian is a CPA with a dingy one-man practice, ZZZ Accounting, south of Chicago. Affleck does a wonderful bit of technical acting, showing us all of his quirks and obsessions. He blows on his fingers before starting a new task, and becomes distracted to the point of conniption if interrupted before he’s finished.

He does tax returns and such for farmers and the small storefronts around his in the strip mall. But on the side he takes high-dollar gigs from disreputable types, finding out who’s been skimming in operations like the drug lords who, as one law enforcement type puts it, “count their money by weighing semis full of cash.”

That LEO is Ray King (J.K. Simmons), a legendary Treasury agent with lots of huge busts to his name. He’s got a few months until forced retirement, and is determined to spend that time tracking down this ghost accountant. He recruits a young analyst with a troublesome past (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) as his paladin. She learns about a troubled young man who was in and out of institutions, including a federal prison stint where he learned at the knee of an elderly mafia numbers man (Jeffrey Tambor).

Now Christian has been recruited to check out a prominent firm that makes robotic limbs for amputees, led by a visionary leader (John Lithgow) who’s not so good with numbers. There Christian meets Dana, an adorably dorky company accountant who first found the discrepancy. They negotiate a delicate little dance, with her trying to figure out this puzzle of a man and him trying to break through decades of imposed discipline.

(Beautiful, smart and vibrant women are often attracted to awkward, socially clumsy men in the movies – which, completely coincidentally, tend to be written by awkward, socially clumsy men.)

Things go bad when a team of assassins (led by Jon Bernthal) come after Dana and Christian. He quickly makes short work of them, and the pair are in the wind.

Things are more or less fine to this point, but then the film keeps tipping over into unexpectedly funny moments that break the mood. Some are obviously intentional, such as Affleck’s affectless responses to Kendrick’s emotional outbursts. But the compounding effect is to undermine the tense atmosphere the movie has worked so hard for.

The plotting is rather obvious -- if you can’t figure out who’s the person pushing all the buttons, or the nature of the third act’s “big surprise” a long way off, you haven’t been paying much attention.

If “The Accountant” had just presented itself as a straightforward action/drama -- “Superspy CPA” -- then we could just sit back and enjoy it for its own sake. By seeking higher ground, and then settling for cheaper thrills, it’s only marginally worth an investment.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Audiences, with expanding options of quality programming on television, would no longer automatically show up to the cinemas for whatever fare they had thrown together. Actors and directors were tired of being workhorses for the studios, told to go here and do that, and wanted the power to pick their own projects. Certain quintessentially American genres, notably the musical and the Western, were increasingly seen as creaky and worn out.

The Golden Age, for good and naught, was waning -- and everyone knew it.

The reaction from Tinseltown, at least for awhile, was to deliver things TV couldn't: color pictures, big action spectacles, widescreen formats, stereo sound, 3-D imagery and so on. One of the big ideas was Cinerama, which stretched an extremely wide image across a huge curved screen, so the audience literally felt like the movie was wrapping around their field of vision.

To get some perspective, the aspect ratio of most films today is 1.85 to 1, width to height. Modern flatscreen TVs are 1.78, so when movies are played on them you only get a little bit of black bar at the top and bottom. (Rarer) widescreen movies are usually 2.35, so the bars are much bigger. Cinerama was 2.59, so when I watched the film on my set the film only occupied the middle third or so of the screen.

Only two major feature films were made using this process, which involved shooting with three separate 35mm cameras and then using a trio of projectors in the theater. "How the West Was Won" was a big success, the second highest-grossing film of that year, but it was too expensive to outfit more than a handful of theaters with the setup.

When shown as a single image on a flat screen, the three pieces tended to not match up well, with noticeable lines during bright scenes. Since most theaters didn't undertake the upgrade, this is how most audiences saw it. Despite its early success, Cinerama died a quick death.

MGM undertook a restoration of the movie in 2000, and new Blu-ray editions include a version that simulates the curved Cinerama look. I've included two stills of the same scene above so you can see the marked difference in presentation.

Filmmakers didn't like the logistics of shooting in Cinerama, either, since it required them to position the actors and backgrounds in such a way that the performers might not even be looking at the person they were talking to in the scene. John Ford, who directed one of the film's five sequences, complained that you couldn't shoot closer than the waist up, which limited the ability to give audiences an emotional connection with the characters.

Much like the green screen technology of today, the final result could be fabulous, but required a talented and attentive cast and director to preserve the performance aspect.

The visual look of the restored "How the West Was Won" is often breathtaking, with glorious vistas of the American fields, rivers and mountains. Narratively the story spreads over 50 years, from 1839 to 1889, covering the settlement of Ohio, the gold rush, the Civil War, the building of a transcontinental railroad line and the height of the outlaw era. It's all told through the eyes of a single family, as subsequent generations grow up and move on further West.

The final movie was a languid 164 minutes, but includes lengthy musical overtures (by Alfred Newman) at the beginning, middle and end that probably consume at least 20 minutes on their own. Everything about the film telegraphs that it wants to be seen as an old-school epic, but really it's several small, barely interrelated stories strung together.

In a gimmicky move, different directors were hired for the five sections, though Henry Hathaway helmed most: the first, second and fifth. Ford directed the third and shortest section on the Civil War, which is really more of a vignette than a true standalone story. George Marshall oversaw the fourth and probably best sequence on the often merciless drive to connect the railroads from east to west.

It was nominated for a bunch of Academy Awards, including Best Picture,
and won three for Sound, Editing and James R. Webb's screenplay -- thought it did not get a nod, notably, for directing.

The film also has the prerequisite "All Star Cast," though most of them have very fleeting parts. John Wayne is in it for about two minutes, along with Henry Morgan, playing great Union generals Sherman and Grant during the Civil War section. Jimmy Stewart has a bigger part as a frontier trapper who falls for one of the daughters (Carroll Baker) of cantankerous pioneer Zebulon Prescott (Karl Malden) in the first sequence. Stewart gets stabbed by some river pirates (led by the great Walter Brennan) but survives to win the girl.

Henry Fonda and Richard Widmark turn up in the railroad section as, respectively, a fiercely independent scout and the hardcase overseer of the building operation, who's willing to break the treaty with the Arapaho Indians and start a war if it'll mean shaving a few days off his schedule.

Gregory Peck plays a gambler who courts, then deserts, then nabs again one of the Prescott daughters, played by Debbie Reynolds, who wants to marry a rich husband and move back East but ends up as a saloon showgirl instead. Robert Preston plays the wagon train master who pitches his own woo at her, telling her about the matching suitability of his huge ranch and her ample child-bearing hips, but she's looking for a little more romance. Thelma Ritter plays an over-the-hill female pioneer who desperately wants to get married; I kept thinking she would hook up with the Preston character.

Eli Wallach turns up in the last sequence as Charlie Gant, a particularly nasty outlaw who avoided jail years ago and is back to torment the lawman who killed his brother. They each put lead into the other they still carry, so there's no love lost. It seems like a clear precursor to Wallach's Spaghetti Western roles later on.

Really the biggest star in the picture in terms of screen time is George Peppard playing Zeb Rawlings, the son of the Jimmy Stewart and Carroll Baker characters. He's the main character in the last three sequences. In the Civil War he's a scrappy young recruit who becomes disillusioned by the senseless killing. In the railroad section he's a U.S. Cavalry officer charged with keeping the peace, who continually butts heads with the Widmark villain. Finally he's the marshal, now with a wife and kids of his own, who faces off with Charlie Gant, as Debbie Reynolds returns as an aged doyenne of San Francisco who wants to spend her last years on a ranch.

Spencer Tracy narrates the tale with openings to each sequence, plus a flowery speech at the end about how the suffering and triumphs of those Western pioneers allowed us to have all the great stuff we have today. It's a little disconcerting as the airborne camera swoops over the vistas, which gradually become more and more occupied with the mark of humanity, including highways and smoke-belching factories. I suppose in 1962 those things were seen as hallmarks of progress rather than urban sprawl.

I guess I like the idea of "How the West Was Won" more than the totality of the movie itself. It's generally quite entertaining, and even grand at times. But it feels more like a lot of haphazard pieces washing down the current of history than a coherent film.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Gosh knows how many cinematic iterations of “Tarzan” there have been, but the newest big-budget effort, “The Legend of Tarzan,” adds little to the oeuvre.

Watching Alexander Skarsgård swing on a vine, fight apes and men, deliver the ubiquitous yodel, etc., it finally occurred to me that this is actually a spiritual remake of another Tarzan movie – “Tarzan the Ape Man,” the 1981 version starring Bo Derek.

Like that soft-core piffle, the main point of this new movie is to delight in displays of human flesh. Except here we’re ogling the guy instead of the girl.

Skarsgård’s body has been transformed into the perquisite tangle of veiny bulges and rippled abdominal landscape favored in this age. We watch him flex and stretch and contemplate the desert of carbs in his diet. Maybe at some point we wonder why he would look like this, since as the story opens he left the jungle many years ago to take up the life of a British nobleman along with his lady love, Jane (Margot Robbie).

Somehow, I doubt they had P90X classes in 19th century England. And you can’t rock a six-pack from playing cricket.

Anyway, they get lured back to the Congo to investigate some allegations of bad behavior, including slavery, at the mining camps, kicking off a confrontation with Leon Rom, a Belgian baddie with dreams of capturing the entire diamond operation. He’s played by Christoph Waltz, in about his sixth version of the “off-putting Christoph Waltz villain.” Samuel L. Jackson tags along as an American envoy offering to help.

A few of the action scenes are gripping, but Tarzan himself is an uncharismatic drip. The truth is the screenplay gives most of the interesting stuff to the supporting actors. Tarzan is just there to be gazed upon.

Maybe 110 minutes of ogling is enough for thee, but not for me.

Bonus features are merely adequate, and are the same for Blu-ray and DVD editions. They include five making-of featurettes and a public service announcement about the African ivory trade.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

“The Girl on the Train” feels like it wants to be the next “Gone Girl,” but it doesn’t quite have the same twisted pretzel of emotional anguish and expertly boiling plot. That film constantly raised the stakes, but this one often wanders in a self-medicating daze like its heroine.

Did I say heroine? The best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins actually has three, all of whom share the first-person perspective at points. Emily Blunt is the clear star here, so director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson take the curious route of telling the story through her eyes, then pulling aside to reveal stuff she couldn’t possibly have seen or known.

The result is a confused and confusing psycho-sexual thriller that plays like a “Roshomon” that wanders deep into a thicket of shifting perspectives it can’t sort out itself. Then it rescues things through conventional plot devices it dusted off from other movies.

The movie’s one saving grace is Blunt, who goes deep into her character of Rachel, who’s an utter mess. Her marriage cratered because of her alcoholism and their inability to have a baby – not to mention her husband Tom’s (Justin Theroux) philandering. Now he’s married to the woman he was cheating on her with, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and they’ve just had a gorgeous daughter.

They’re living in Rachel’s old house next to the rail line in Ardsley, a quiet upstate New York commuter town. Every day, Rachel takes the train into the big city, ostensibly for her job but also so she can spy on them and dissolve into a pool of resentment and self-pity. Constantly sipping from a CamelBak water bottle she’s secretly filled with clear booze, Rachel is perpetually stumbling around and experiencing blackouts.

She’s also become fixated on another woman who lives two doors down, Megan (Haley Bennett), a blonde goddess with a hunk of a husband, Scott (Luke Evans), whose amorous attentions toward her are fervent. (Jeez, buy some window shades, folks.)

But there’s more to each woman’s tale than meets the eye, and the strain becomes more intense when Megan goes missing. The cops (Allison Janney plays the chief detective) come sniffing around Rachel, who seems like a top suspect. She had a blackout that day and doesn’t remember much, but was seen chasing Megan and shouting insults at her. And Rachel woke up that night covered in blood.

Blunt really grunges herself up for the role – hollow eyes, ragged lips, tangled hair, even a bit of mustache. She dresses one step up from a bag lady and talks about the twin delusions of rage and envy she has toward the other women. “She’s what I lost. She’s everything I want to be,” she says.

At least early on, much of the appeal of “The Girl on the Train” is exploring such a broken character and contemplating the prospect that she may actually be guilty of some horrendous crime. Flashbacks show her being capable of violence, and even once stole into Anna’s house while she was asleep and carried the baby off into the back yard.

But things spin sideways. We’re introduced to a therapist (Edgar Ramirez) who was treating Megan and may be complicit. Rachel undertakes an amateur Nancy Drew act, befriending Scott and then signing up for her own sessions with the therapist. Just when it feels like the story should be building toward something, it just seems to devolve.

I won’t belabor the clunky maneuvers of the plot, other than to say you’ll probably figure out the true villain long before they’re revealed. It’s never a good thing when the audience reaches the final stop far ahead of the train.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

The most surprising thing about “The Birth of a Nation” is the quiet lyricism it brings to the brutal depiction of American slavery. We’ve seen the cruelty before -- the flesh-tearing whippings, the use of women as sexual chattel, the everyday degradation of men -- most recently in “12 Years a Slave” and the television reprise of “Roots.”

But Nate Parker, who stars, wrote the screenplay and directed, offers both tenderness and righteous anger in the story of Nat Turner, a black slave preacher who led a violent rebellion in 1831 Virginia.

It’s a film of exquisite beauty exploring the ugliest chapter in the story of America.

This movie is perfectly posited for this moment in time in our national conversation about race and violence, with too many African-Americans gunned down by police under often questionable justification.

Parker’s approach is biblical in tone without ever becoming preachy. He does not present Turner’s revolt as “right” -- seeing as it included the deaths of some 60 whites, including women and children -- but the inevitable outcome of generations of suppressing a people’s liberty and very humanity.

Nat Turner begins as a normal kid, singled out for his intellect and raised inside the plantation house, growing up the playmate of the owner’s son, Samuel. Forced to return to the fields after the master’s death, Nat becomes the slaves’ spiritual leader, exhorting them to follow scripture and submit to the will of their masters.

He is, in essence, a “safe” slave in a culture where whites are constantly fearful of reprisal from their slaves, who often outnumber them. Nat is so effective at keeping the peace that Samuel (Armie Hammer), now the master, agrees to rent him out to other owners to preach to their slaves and soothe them.

Samuel is presented as a fairly tolerant master, an ineffectual drunkard who barely bothers with the upkeep of the farm, so Nat is horrified at the treatment he sees at other plantations. In one painful scene, the teeth of a slave refusing to eat are casually knocked out with a hammer and chisel so a nasty gruel can be forced down his throat.

We witness Nat begin to slowly change, from a man patiently awaiting his kingdom in heaven to one who resents the hell he’s being forced to live through on earth. He’s haunted by visions, blood pouring from the crops, and believes he’s being called upon by God.

That feeling is accelerated when his beloved wife, Cherry (Aja Naomi King), is ravaged by some bestial slave hunters, with Jackie Earle Haley playing the leader who has a personal past with Nat.

The movie mostly follows the historical record, while fiddling with some details. For instance, Samuel Turner was the brother, not the son, of Nat’s original owner. And Nat was sold to another slave owner, Giles Reese, by the time of the uprising. But these are largely quibbles that do not detract from the tale.

The imagery in the movie will haunt you -- the feet of men and women gracefully swinging after being lynched; a young slave child skipping merrily while a girl uses a noose as a leash for her plaything. Its very gracefulness makes the horrors stand out further. The cinematography by Elliot Davis and the spare musical score by Henry Jackman are both wonderful.

“The Birth of a Nation” shares a title with a seminal 1915 film by silent film master D.W. Griffith, which is a technical marvel that established much of the cinematic language we understand today -- but also celebrated the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Parker has made a conscious effort to reclaim the name from its racist past.

Normally I’d be inclined to call that an act of stupendous pomposity. Except that Nate Parker’s film truly is a rebirth, a new cinematic declaration for this young century. It is a chorus of rage, sung without malice but also without apology.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

“X-Men: Apocalypse” continues the saga of the mutant super-heroes in their brave new retconned world, in which the course of history has been altered and new, younger actors have taken over (nearly) all of the roles.

(Comic book heroes may be able to bench-press buildings or regrow their own flesh. But their Hollywood counterparts are still batting .000 in the long war against their arch-nemesis, Father Time.)

It plays out a lot like “Captain America: Civil War” – a messy but vigorous smackdown between super-powered beings. The mayhem definitely overpowers the characterization here, as we jump from one action set piece to another, with little pauses for talkie scenes that tend to drag.

The story here is that an ancient Egyptian evil has been unleashed in the form of Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), who has the ability to absorb the powers of other mutants. He quickly forms himself his own team of henchmen, including Storm, Angel and others. Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is also recruited after a personal tragedy while trying to live a normal life.

The good guys are less organized, led by Professor Xavier (James McAvoy) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), who’s taken on the mantle of the outlaw voice of reason in the mutant community. Sophie Turner takes over the role of Jean Grey, while Tye Sheridan and Nicholas Hoult are Cyclops and Beast, respectively.

The movie is overlong at nearly 2½ hours, though it’s more a matter of emphasizing stuff that didn’t deserve so much screen time to the detriment of things that did. Still, I’d call it the best of the lot of a weak field of 2016 superhero movies.

Bonus features are quite robust. Director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg do a feature-length audio commentary track. Singer also introduces a handful of deleted and extended scenes. It also comes with a gag reel, an hour-long making-of documentary, concept art and photo gallery plus a wrap party video.